Hiragana History Art Typography

Hiragana (平仮名,ひらがな, Japanese pronunciation: [çiɾaɡaꜜna])[note 1] is a Japanese syllabary, one
component of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana, kanji and in some cases Latin script. It
is a phonetic lettering system. The word hiragana literally means "ordinary" or "simple" kana ("simple"
originally as contrasted with kanji).[1][2]
Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems. With one or two minor exceptions, each syllable in the
Japanese language (strictly, each mora) is represented by one character (or one digraph) in each system.
This may be either a vowel such as "a" (hiragana あ); a consonant followed by a vowel such as "ka" (か);
or "n" (ん), a nasal sonorant which, depending on the context, sounds either like English m, n or ng ([ŋ])
when syllable-final or like the nasal vowels of French, Portuguese or Polish. Because the characters of
the kana do not represent single consonants (except in the case of ん "n"), the kana are referred to as
syllabic symbols and not alphabetic letters.[3]
Hiragana is used to write okurigana (kana suffixes following a kanji root, for example to inflect verbs and
adjectives), various grammatical and function words including particles, as well as miscellaneous other
native words for which there are no kanji or whose kanji form is obscure or too formal for the writing
purpose.[4] Words that do have common kanji renditions may also sometimes be written instead in
hiragana, according to an individual author's preference, for example to impart an informal feel.
Hiragana is also used to write furigana, a reading aid that shows the pronunciation of kanji characters.
There are two main systems of ordering hiragana: the old-fashioned iroha ordering and the more
prevalent gojūon ordering.
The modern hiragana syllabary consists of 46 base characters:
5 singular vowels
40 consonant–vowel unions
1 singular consonant
These are conceived as a 5×10 grid (gojūon, 五十音, "Fifty Sounds"), as illustrated in the adjacent table,
read あ (a), い (i), う (u), え (e), お (o), か (ka), き (ki), く (ku), け (ke), こ (ko) and so forth, with the
singular consonant ん (n) appended to the end. Of the 50 theoretically possible combinations, yi and wu
do not exist in the language and ye, wi and we are obsolete (or virtually obsolete) in modern Japanese.
wo (を) is usually pronounced as a vowel (o) in modern Japanese and is preserved in only one use, as a
particle.
Romanization of the kana does not always strictly follow the consonant-vowel scheme laid out in the
table. For example, ち, nominally ti, is very often romanised as chi in an attempt to better represent the
actual sound in Japanese.
These basic characters can be modified in various ways. By adding a dakuten marker ( ゛), a voiceless
consonant is turned into a voiced consonant: k→g, ts/s→z, t→d, h→b and ch/sh→j. For example, か (ka)
becomes が (ga). Hiragana beginning with an h sound can also add a handakuten marker ( ゜) changing
the h to a p. For example, は (ha) becomes ぱ (pa).
A small version of the hiragana for ya, yu, or yo ( ゃ, ゅ or ょ respectively) may be added to hiragana
ending in i. This changes the i vowel sound to a glide (palatalization) to a, u or o. For example, き (ki)
plus ゃ (small ya) becomes きゃ (kya). Addition of the small y kana is called yōon.
A small tsu っ , called a sokuon, indicates that the following consonant is geminated (doubled). In
Japanese this is an important distinction in pronunciation; for example, compare さか, saka, "hill" with
さっか, sakka, "author". The sokuon also sometimes appears at the end of utterances, where it denotes
a glottal stop, as in いてっ! ([iteʔ], Ouch!). However, it cannot be used to double the na, ni, nu, ne, no
syllables' consonants – to double these, the singular n ( ん) is added in front of the syllable, as in みんな
(minna, "all").
Hiragana usually spells long vowels with the addition of a second vowel kana; for example, おかあさん
(o-ka-a-sa-n, "mother"). The chōonpu (long vowel mark) ( ー ) used in katakana is rarely used with
hiragana, for example in the word らーめん , rāmen, but this usage is considered non-standard in
Japanese; the Okinawan language uses chōonpu with hiragana. In informal writing, small versions of the
five vowel kana are sometimes used to represent trailing off sounds ( はぁ, haa, ねぇ, nee). Standard
and voiced iteration marks are written in hiragana as ゝ and ゞ respectively.

Hiragana History Art Typography

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Hiragana (平仮名,ひらがな, Japanese pronunciation: [çiɾaɡaꜜna])[note 1] is a Japanese syllabary, one

The modern hiragana syllabary consists of 46 base characters:

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